If you like challenging content and clunky pre-Web 2.0 layout, I’ve got the perfect site for you. While the questionably formatted photographic elements may raise a few eyebrows, you can hear a real heart beating here. Dang intellectuals! Usability rating: 5/10.

I’m thrilled to be associated with “challenging content” and intellectuals. I’m glad my heartbeat has been heard. I’ll consider the source regarding “clunky” and “questionably formatted.” I’m not sure I can stomach being in the same context as Mario Burgos, however.

Take some time to look around. “Get to know me,” as Jon Lovitz so famously said. Thanks for visiting. peace, mjh

PS: Web 2.0 (Internet) The second generation of the World Wide Web, especially the movement away from static webpages to dynamic and shareable content and social networking. [Hmmm. My database-driven website with social-networking content (Flickr) may not be 3.0.]

Of course the RNC survey is just one part of the scare tactics being used by opponents of health care reform. They have suggested that health reform could “pull the plug on grandma“, subject mentally ill children to “death panels,” and even herald in a new era of eugenics.

Winthrop Quigley is in a class by himself as a writer. He does a superb job of breaking down complex topics. Everyone should read all of his column on health care coverage (linked).

ABQJOURNAL BIZ: For sake of argument, stick to the factsBy Winthrop Quigley Of the Journal If the nation is to have any hope of a reasonable debate about health policy, people on both ends of the political spectrum would do well to renounce some cherished myths about health care not only in the United States but in the rest of the world. Policies based on reality really should work better. There is a case to be made that commercial insurance has no place in health care. There is a case to be made that government has no place in health care. …

Some of the predictable sniping occurred at Martin Heinrich’s town hall on the health care bills Saturday. A noisy but minority cohort insisted on describing as socialism proposals to cover more low-income people with public funds and to establish a government-operated competitor for insurance companies.

Socialism as a theory says that the only input to production of any value is labor and therefore the only return from production should be to labor. As a practice, socialism generally means central planning and state ownership of factors of production.

I am not a big fan of the federal bail-out of GM and Chrysler. I have written in the Journal that I doubt the government-run insurance company that President Obama favors will make any meaningful difference to health care in America. I do not believe that any business is too big to fail.

But I am a big fan of calling things by their proper name. The people screaming about socialism at Heinrich’s town hall were upset about the car company bailouts, the need of the government to recapitalize Fannie Mae, investments in Citigroup, loans and warrants in the finance sector. What they are upset about is not socialism but state capitalism — state investment in the private sector.

There is a bunch of that around. The state of New Mexico invested in Eclipse Aviation. China’s sovereign wealth funds have positions in natural resource companies. The United States owns stock in Citigroup.

Like any owner, sovereign owners have a say in how things are done, but they are no more interested in running the companies they invest in than is the average worker who owns shares of IBM through his 401K plan.
But here’s the fun part: It turns out Uncle Sam has been a very saavy investor. We the taxpayers own 34 percent of Citigroup, and based on its recent stock price so far we’ve made $11 billion. (Citi is the only bank in which the U.S. government has an ownership stake.) We earned 23 percent on the TARP money we gave Goldman Sachs. In fact, it looks as if the government will make money on most of the deals it did during the financial turmoil of the past year or so.

Obama and the Democrat Party have returned us full circle to the tyrannical days of Taxation Without Representation. And if I might point out to our politicians and the rest of their communist colleagues, it was Taxation Without Representation which started this country and it’s going to be Taxation Without Representation which ends it. CLYDE J. ARAGON Albuquerque

Seriously, Clyde? Were you not represented by Tricky Dick Nixon, the crook, and Spiro Agnew, the godfather of thuggery? Were you not represented by Ronnie Raygun, the god of the GOP and bumpersticker politics? Were you not represented by Gingrinch and the Contract on America? Were you not represented by BushCo? In all those years, I paid taxes. In most of those years, if I complained, your ilk told me to shut up or move to another country. Now, after one election, you’re ready to dissolve the union? Where’s your respect for America? peace, mjh

“Write those letters now. Call your friends, and tell them to write them. If you don’t, this program I promise you will pass just as surely as the sun will come up tomorrow. And behind it will come other federal programs that will invade every area of freedom as we have known it in this country, until, one day… we will awake to find that we have socialism. And if you don’t do this, and if I don’t do it, one of these days, you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free.” – Ronnie Raygun railing against Medicare to the AMA in 1961

I first heard of John Wayne Higgins when he ran for Bernco Probate Judge in 1998. Aside from his cool name, his most distinguishing trait in that race was a complete lack of probate experience. That’s NM’s constitution, for you: The only requirements for county office are being 18 and paying a small filing fee.

Higgins is a DWI attorney. After his second arrest for DWI, I wonder if he is subconsciously drawn to DWI or if the appeal is learning to game the system. The belligerent, bellicose drunk in the police videos clearly needs to dry out. But, heck, can you blame him for celebrating after getting off of domestic violence charges that same day?

Higgins should accept his 48 hours in jail (not yet served) and one year probation. Of course, he’s going to fight it to restore his, ahem, good name. Oh, but those videos will be around forever, JW.

Fifty years ago, four years after I was born in the Territory of Hawai’i, Hawai’i became the 50th state. Let’s overlook the invasion, conquest, and overthrow of the indigenous sovereign a hundred years ago, and hang loose. Aloha!

Five-oh is five-oh. « The Edge of the American West

I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, by the virtue of the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States, do hereby proclaim August 21, 2009, as the Fiftieth Anniversary of Hawaii Statehood. I call upon the people of the United States to observe this day with appropriate programs, ceremonies, and activities.